The Tamesis
So, here’s to the weirdest Monday in May! While the 2026 Met Gala red carpet was dominated by nude dresses and Grecian draping, some attendees chose to embrace a “fashion as art” dress code with a sense of the uncanny — weird, grotesque, masked and multi-limbed.
The likes of Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber put their raised nipples and sculpting corsets on full display, but others opted to forgo it body-body-body In a more subversive way. French pop star and model Yseult, for example, chose a fluid tuxedo-style dress by Harris Reed with a gilded gold bodice and hand-beaded navel.
“Yseult was very keen to explore ideas centered around her body,” Reed explains, “and we explored various ideas to really shape her into a work of art: like a statue draped in fabric that showcased the magnificence of her and her body.” The focal point was a beaded gold bodice that accentuated her curves and silhouette, as well as a beaded navel. Both Iseult and Reed found a kinship in their devotion to theater, so they upped the ante with halo-effect headdresses. Her glamor was equally mesmerizing, with asymmetrical lashes and colorful melted eyeshadow.
Jewelry designer Sabine Getty attended the Met Gala for the first time. Still, she felt like she was being stepped on on the red carpet — both figuratively and literally, as she wore a sheer nude illusion gown by Ashi Studio, with painted hands caressing her waist and chest.
For many, covering up also makes sense. Gwendoline Christie wore a scarlet tulle dress by Giles Deacon, a colorful feather headdress by milliner Stephen Jones and brandished a mask by British Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing. The mask with rosy cheeks and deep red lips matched her own appearance. (Illustrated by Pat McGrath.) It was inspired by the lavishly textured portraits of John Singer Sargent and Madame Yevonde’s 1938 photograph “Mask (Rosemary Chance)” – the latter questioning themes of double selves and vanity.
Then there’s former Blue Origin NS-31 space cadet Katy Perry, who covered her face with a mirrored astronaut-like Miodrag Guberinic mask that matched her custom white Stella McCartney gown. She had a sixth finger on her gloves – poking fun at the common mistakes artificial intelligence makes when generating images of people – and she pulled tarot cards on the carpet. There’s a lot going on there. Ananya Birla also opted for metallics, wearing a robotic face mask designed by Subodh Gupta that contrasted with her sculptural bodice and gown.
Robert Wun’s dreamy, ethereal couture designs, with their clever use of silhouettes and shapes, always make a splash on the 2026 Met Gala carpet. For days, instead of legs, we had arms. Seven-time attendee Jordan Roth brought a friend in the form of a 3D-printed sculpture and hugged him from behind, wearing a gray gown that turned him into a living sculpture. There are many statues in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but Ross wanted to take the concept of classic human renderings a step further. “A single figure often poses for the audience, but multiple figures are often in some intense moment—romance, love, lust, fear, violence. There’s something passionate going on between these bodies,” Ross shared Fashion. “My curiosity is, ‘What would it be like to be the body in that sculpture, to live in that sculpture?'”
